Free You Saved Me, Too: What a Holocaust Survivor Taught Me about Living, Dying, Fighting, Loving, and Swearing in Yiddish by Susan Kushner Resnick Page B

during this month of this year. I was thirteen, and a member of the first generation of Jewish girls who were expected, rather than allowed, to step up to the ark. Boys, of course, have marked their thirteenth year with a bar mitzvah celebration of some type since around the sixteenth century. Even you had one, though it wasn’t the fancy ordeal it’s become in America. You simply reported to the synagogue on a specific Saturday morning in 1932 and repeated some Torah passages after the rabbi read them. Or so your memory tells you. I suspect that you knew your portion by heart.
    This ritual bestows upon hormonally freaked-out teenagers the Jewish equivalent of adult responsibilities. After proving they’re capable of reading from the Torah, they are expected to obey all the commandments and to behave morally like a Jewish grown-up, whatever that means.
    I did not become a bat mitzvah, or as we called them back then, bas mitzvahs. It was before the pronunciation authorities changed the way we speak Hebrew. The “s” ending, as in
bas
or
Shabbas
, was too reminiscent of the way European Jews said the words. European Jews, the thinking went, had let themselves get killed. Therefore, the European Jews’ way of pronouncing Hebrew words was wimpy. The “t” ending—
bat, Shabbat
—was Israeli. Israelis were tough. Israelis ended their words with hard consonants. Israelis would have killed back.
    But however you want to pronounce it and however you want to say it—the casual and customary “had a bat mitzvah” versus the grammatically correct “became a bat mitzvah”—I didn’t. I am deep into my forties, but in the eyes of the Jewish community, I am still a girl.
    Girls of the seventies had equal-with-the-boys ceremonies to mark their coming of age as Jewish adults. No longer scheduled on Friday nights or done without a Torah, this was the real thing. I guess I should have been proud to finally have such an opportunity, but I couldn’t handle it. I have always been terrible at foreign languages. I took five years of public school Spanish, plus two years in college before I could finally speak a few fluent sentences. And even then I had to be drunk to get the verbs right.
    I started Hebrew school in fourth grade as most Reform Jewish kids do, but I seemed to be the only one who didn’t catch on. I was okay when we read aloud as a group; all it takes is some mumbling spiked with a few
ch, ch
mucus clears of the throat. But reading aloud by myself was a disaster. I always got it wrong, so the other kids knew I was the dope of the class. This, of course, was humiliating and gave me good reason to fight going to class.
Please, please, please, please, please don’t make me go
, I’d whine. They still made me go. Eventually, the teacher figured out that I knew nothing and suggested a tutor. This opened a series of negotiations between my parents and me. I agreed to work with the tutor if they
please, please, please
wouldn’t make me go back to Hebrew school. They demanded that I finish the first grade of Hebrew with the tutor, but they wouldn’t force me to continue. If I didn’t continue, I couldn’t have a bat mitzvah.
    Wow, ten-year-old me thought. God
is
good.
    I mean, I didn’t need the money. My parents paid for my food, shelter, clothing, and David Cassidy records, so why slog through what was clearly just a money-making enterprise? I don’t remember hearing an explanation about the important reasons to go through the ritual, but I was a visual learner and had watched my older brother become rich enough to buy his own TV after his multi-partied event. He seemed happy with the exchange—years of suffering for a TV—but no amount of money could inspire me to endure three more years of Hebrew school. I spent the second half of fourth grade meeting weekly at a card table in my family room with the tutor, a young guy with lanky arms and a lanky mustache who was also, improbably, the principal of our religious